Replies

Until the GOP figures out how to counter media bias (talk radio, FOX News and blogs are simply not enough), we will continue to have a difficult struggle to win.

The first step in fighting a problem is to name the problem correctly. Granted that TV dramas and movies are tendentiously leftist, there is no obvious way that that can be modified within the framework of First Amendment freedom. The problem is the bias of journalism.

Whereas journalism in the founding era up to the Civil War consisted of small, mostly weekly, newspapers whose primary feature was the individual POV of the printer, since the Civil War journalism has been becoming more homogeneous. I don’t think it was the war, and I don’t think it was the high speed printing press - IMHO it was the telegraph. The telegraph, and the Associated Press. The AP homogenized journalism by its style guides for copy to be picked up and printed nationwide. A reporter wants to be read and be influential, and so the style guides and the general interests of journalism dominate the idiosyncrasy of the individual reporter.

Whereas wire service journalism (in fact primarily the AP, but any wire service would have the same incentives and the same effects) claims objectivity, such a claim is an oxymoron. The only way to even attempt to be objective is to start with an open declaration of how your own interests and preferences could be affected by the report you are filing. And yet being open about that is precisely the opposite of claiming to actually be objective. You can promote yourself as being objective, or you can actually try to be objective. Choose one. Wire service journalism chooses appearance, at the expense of the reality.
Another way to make the same point is to observe that it is hard to put your finger on the difference between the claims of wisdom made by the Sophists of ancient Greece and the claims of objectivity made by modern journalists. Is objectivity unwise, or is wisdom not objective??? The conclusion is that the journalist is no different from the Sophist - and the Sophists became byword for slippery, self-serving argumentation, and the origin of the term, “sophistry.”

The classical rejection of the Sophists was accomplished by the Philosophers. The word means, “lover of wisdom,” and it reflects the fact that the philosophers eschewed claiming wisdom and claimed only to be open to facts and logic. Similarly, the “conservative” talk show host who is effective is the one who drains the emotion from the discussion, grounds his argument in facts and logic, and demands the same of anyone who calls in.
I wish that the talk show hosts would use the facts and logic I have discussed above, rather than descending into heat rather than light when discussing “bias in the media.” They should go after journalism because of its homogeneity, and because in claiming objectivity it proves that it is tendentious. It even should be possible to sue the AP and its membership because of the damage the AP does, and the fact that it violates the Sherman Antitrust Act.